"Good," Ira said, and went
back inside the tent and closed the flap. The rain was clicking hard on
the canvas now. It had been a mistake to come here, one born purely out
of pride, he thought. What was to be gained by confronting Rufus Atkins
personally? He was going to pull his convict labor off Atkins' property
and ruin his credit by running a newspaper notice to the effect he
would not co-sign any of Atkins' loan applications or be responsible
for his debts. Ira computed it would take about six weeks for Atkins'
paltry business operations to collapse.
When you could do that much
damage to a man with a three-dollar newspaper advertisement, why waste
time dealing with him on a personal basis?
It was time for a fine lunch
and a bottle of good wine and the company of people who weren't idiots.
Maybe he should think about a trip to Nashville to see his old friend
General Forrest.
He smiled at a story that was
beginning to circulate about the regard in which Forrest had been held
by General Sherman. After Forrest had driven every Yankee soldier from
the state of Mississippi, Sherman supposedly assembled his staff and
said, "I don't care what it takes. Lose ten thousand men if you have
to. But kill that goddamn sonofabitch Bedford Forrest."
Nathan should have that put
on his tombstone, Ira thought.
But where was that tune coming
from? In his mind's eye he saw hand-carved wooden horses turning on a
miniature merry-go-round, the delicately brushed paint worn by time,
the windup key rotating as the music played inside the base.
For just a moment he felt a
sense of theft about his life that was indescribable. He tore through
the other rooms in the tent, searching for the origin of the sound,
kicking over a chair with a black Kluxer robe hung on the back. Then,
through a crack in the rear flap, he saw it, a wind chime tinkling on a
wood post. He ripped it from the nail that held it and stalked back
through Atkins' sleeping area, then ducked through the mosquito netting
and curtain that separated it from the front room.
He smelled an odor like
camphor and perfume, like flowers pressed between the pages of an old
book or blood that had dried inside a balled handkerchief. He
straightened his back, the chime clenched in his hand, and thought he
saw his mother's silhouette beckoning for him to approach her, the wide
folds of her dark blue dress like a portal into memories that he did
not want to relive.
WILLIE tethered his team under
a huge mimosa tree on the edge of St. Peter's Cemetery, mixed mortar in
a wheelbarrow, and bricked together a foundation for Jim's crypt. Then
he dragged Jim's box on top of the foundation and began bricking and
mortaring four walls around the box. Clouds tumbled across the sky and
he could smell wildflowers and salt inside the wind off the Gulf. As he
tapped each brick level with the handle of the trowel, the sun warm on
his shoulders, he tried to forget the insult that Tige had flung in his
face.
If it had come from anyone
else, he thought. But Tige was uncanny in his intuition about the truth.
Was it indeed Willie's fate to
forever mourn the past, to dwell upon the war and the loss of a love
that was probably not meant to be? Had he made his journey to Shiloh
less out of devotion to a friend than as a histrionic and grandiose
attempt at public penance? Was he simply a self-deluded fool?
There are days when I wish I
had fallen at your side, Jim.
You were always
my steadfast
pal, Willie. Don't
talk like that. You have to carry the guidon tor
both of us.
I'll never get over the war.
I'll never forget Shiloh.
You don't need to, you ole
groghead. You were
brave. Why should we have to forget? That's for cowards. One day you'll
tell your grandchildren you scouted for Bedford Forrest.
And a truly odious experience
it was, Willie said. He thought he heard Jim laugh inside the bricks.
He saw a shadow break across his own. He turned on his knee,
splattering himself with mortar from the trowel.
"Sorry I said them words,"
Tige said. He took off his kepi and twirled it on the tip of his finger.
"Which words would those be?"
Willie said, grinning at the edge of his mouth, one eye squinted
against the sunlight.
"Saying Miss Abigail didn't
have no interest in you. Saying you didn't care about nobody except
dead people."
"I must have been half-asleep,
because I have no memory of it," Willie said.
"You sure can tell a mess of
fibs, Willie Burke."
"You didn't happen to bring
some lunch with you,
did you?"
"No, but Robert Perry
was looking for you."
"Now, why would
noble Robert be looking for the likes of me?"
"Ask him, 'cause there
he
comes yonder. Y'all are a mysterious kind," Tige said.
"How's that?"
"You lose a war, then spend
every day of your life losing it again in your head. Never seen a bunch
so keen on beating theirself up all the time."
"I think you're a man of great
wisdom, young Tige," Willie said. Robert Perry walked through the rows
of crypts and slung a canvas choke sack on the bed of Willie's wagon.
It made a hard, knocking sound when it struck the wood. His skin was
deeply tanned, freckled with sunlight under the mimosa, his uncut hair
bleached on the tips. The wind gusted behind him, ruffling the leaves
in the tree, and the countryside suddenly fell into shadow. "It's going
to rain again," Robert said.
"Looks like it," Willie
replied.
"Wh
y don't you tell
people where you're going once in a while?" he
asked.
"Out of sorts today?" Willie
said.
"That worthless fellow Rufus
Atkins was drunk down in the bottoms this morning. The word is he and
this McCain character, the one who runs the hardware store, put on
their sheets last night and paid Flower Jamison a call," Robert said.
"Say that again?" Willie said,
rising to his feet.
"Ah, I figured right," Robert
said.
"Figured what?"
"You couldn't wait to put your
hand in it as soon as you heard," Robert said.
"What's in that bag?" Willie
asked.
"My law books."
"What else?"
"My sidearm," Robert said.
ABIGAIL Dowling whipped her
buggy horse down the road and into the entrance of Rufus Atkins'
property. She felt a sickness in her chest and a dryness in her throat
that she could compare only to a recurrent dream in which she was
peering over the rim of a canyon into the upended points of rocks far
below. She waited for the voices to begin, the ones that had called her
a traitor and poseur who fed off the sorrow and the inadequacies of
others, the voices that had always drained her energies and robbed her
of self-worth and denied her a place in the world that she could claim
as her own. But this time she would fight to keep them in abeyance; she
would rid herself of self-excoriation and for once in her life
surrender herself to a defining, irrevocable act that would not only
set her free but save an innocent like Flower Jamison from bearing a
cross that an unjust world had placed on her shoulders.
What would her father say to
her now? God, she missed him. He was the only human being whose word
and wisdom she never doubted. Would he puff on his pipe silently, his
eyes smiling with admiration and approval? But she already knew the
answer to her question. That jolly, loving, Quaker physician who could
walk with beggars and princes would
have only one form of advice for her in this situation, and it would
not be what she wanted to hear.
She cracked the whip on her
horse's back and tried to empty her mind of thoughts about her father.
She would think about the pistol that rested on the seat beside her,
substituting one worry for another, and concentrate on questions about
the residue of dried mud she had seen wedged between the cylinder and
the frame and inside the trigger guard, about the possibility the caps
were damp or that mud was impacted inside the barrel.
The rain was as hard and cold
as hail on her skin. The convicts were climbing down from the house
frame, raking water out of their hair and beards, grinning at the
prospect of getting off work early. She reined up her horse and stepped
down into the mud.
"Hold up there, missy," the
foreman said.
His stomach was the size of a
washtub and he wore an enormous vest buttoned across it and a silver
watch on a chain. A black trusty guard in prison stripe pants and a red
shirt and a palmetto hat stood behind him, the stock of a shotgun
propped casually against his hip, his ebony skin slick with rain, his
eyes fastened on the outdoor kitchen under the live oak where the cooks
were preparing the midday meal.
"My business is with Mr.
Atkins," she said.
"Hit ain't none of mine, then.
But, tell me, missy, what's that you got hid behind your leg?" the
foreman said.
"Are you a Christian man?"
"I try to be."
"If you'd like to see Jesus
today, just get in my way and see what happens," she said.
The foreman snapped open the
cover on his watch and looked at the time, then snapped the cover
closed again and replaced the watch in his vest pocket. "I reckon I've
had enough folks fussing at me in one day. How about we eat us some of
them beans?" he said to the trusty guard.
Abigail stepped up on the
plank walkway that led to Rufus Atkins' tent. The rain was slackening
now, the sun breaking from behind a cloud, and the sky seemed filled
with slivers of glass. She paused in front of the tent flap and cocked
back the hammer on the revolver with both thumbs.
Then
her
hands
began to shake and she lowered the pistol, her resolve draining from
her like water through the bottom of a cloth sack. Why was she
so weak? Why could she not do this one violent act in defense of a
totally innocent creature whom the world had abused for a lifetime? In
this moment, caught between the brilliance of the rain slanting across
the sun and the grayness of the cane fields behind her, she finally
knew who she was, not only a poseur but an empty vessel for whom
stridence had always been a surrogate for courage.
She heard a rumbling sound on
the road and turned and saw Willie Burke and Robert Perry crouched
forward in a wagon, the boy named Tige clinging to the sides in back.
Willie had doubled over the reins in his hands and was laying the
leather across his horses' flanks.
So once more she would become
the burden of others, to be consoled and protected and mollified, a
well-intended, neurotic Yankee who was her own worst enemy.
But if she couldn't kill, at
least she could put the fear of God in a rotten piece of human flotsam
like Rufus Atkins.
She raised the pistol and
threw back the tent flap and stepped inside just as a man emerged from
a curtain and a tangle of mosquito netting in back, his posture stooped
in order to get through the netting, a metal object in his right hand.
His eyes lifted to hers, just before she pointed the revolver with both
hands and squeezed the trigger and a dirty cloud of smoke erupted into
his face.
Her ears rang from the
pistol's report. Then she heard his weight collapse as he sank to one
knee, a bright ruby in the center of his forehead, the muscle tone in
his face melting, his arm fighting for purchase on top of a worktable,
like an unpracticed elderly man whose belated attempt at genuflection
had proved inadequate.
Outside the tent, she dropped
the revolver from her hand and walked toward the stunned faces of
Willie Burke, Robert Perry, and Tige McGuffy.
"I killed Ira Jamison by
mistake. But I'm glad he's dead just the same. God forgive me," she
said.
"You shot Ira Jamison?" Willie
said.
"He had a wind chime in his
hand. A silly little wind chime," she said.
She buried her face in
Willie's chest. He could feel the muscles in
her back heaving
under the
flats of his hands and could not tell if she
was laughing or
sobbing.
THE rain stopped and the air
filled with a greenish-yellow cast that was like the tarnish on brass.
The wind came up hard out of the south, flattening the cane in the
fields, whipping the tent in which Ira Jamison died, riffling water in
the irrigation ditches, scattering snow egrets that lifted like white
rose petals above the canopy in the swamp. Out over the Gulf a tree of
lightning pulsed without sound inside a giant stormhead.
As an old man Willie Burke
would wonder what the eyes of God saw from above on that cool,
windswept, salt-flecked August day of 1865. Did His eyes see the chime
pried from Ira Jamison's dead hand and Robert Perry's revolver
substituted for it?
Or did His eyes choose not to
focus on an individual act but instead on the great panorama taking
place below Him, one that involved all His childrenleased convicts
perched like carrion birds on a house frame in the middle of a
wetlands, abolitionists and schoolteachers whose altruism was such they
flayed themselves for their inability to change the world's nature,
slavers whose ships groaned with sounds that would follow them to the
grave, mothers and fathers and children who had no last names and would
labor their lives away for the profit of others without ever receiving
an explanation?